alt Hacker NewsWell, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.
> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.
And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".
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This is brilliant. I haven't even thought about some of the questions you ask. Thank you.
This is the most elegant and polite refutation of age verification I've ever seen
>It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version?
I don't see a plausible scenario where the implementation of this mandate makes further mandates more easy to get passed. An age field and an API to access it is as trivial as it gets. More onerous age checking is not something that is an extension to or somehow made more easy given the pre-existence of the age field. No argument against more onerous checking is undermined or rendered less severe due to an age field already existing. There is no slippery slope here.
>So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls?
There is already a pretty significant market for parental controls, so presumably if their quality were a limiting factor in their adoption the market would have responded already. Parents simply aren't interested enough or savvy enough to apply them. Parental controls also just intrinsically suck for a lot of reasons. They are either mostly ineffective or wildly intrusive, like giving total access to children's communications and internet activity to external companies.
>Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that?
Presumably an adult is involved in purchasing devices and setting up accounts for their young children. Putting an age of account holder field into the account set up workflow seems pretty effective. It's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be for it to be a major improvement over the status quo. The lack of verification is a feature of this mandate, not a bug.
>we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right?
As those pushing this kind of legislation are fond of pointing out, we have age checks for buying alcohol or purchasing adult magazines in shops. Presumably these don't run afoul of the first amendment. This idea that we can't or shouldn't mandate age checking in some form to access content deemed inappropriate to children is just a losing argument. Again, the writing is on the wall here.
At this point anything that makes computers less usable is a good thing, time we go back to the real world. It was extremely unpleasant while it lasted.
This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions
I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer